Google Adsense Tips

To blend or contrast that is the question!! Based on what I have read from a few blogs, there are mixed recommendations on whether to blend your ads with the content on your site or to contrast it. By blending, you make your ads seem like they are part of the content while contrasting makes them stand out. Its hard to say which method works and probably depends a lot on how your content is structured.

Dinesh.com is primarily a blog and information site and most of my users spend time reading something and I have found that the blending method works best over the contrast method. This is probably because when someone is reading something they typically do not want to get distracted from what they are reading. I have managed to use the blend technique in the following way.

Blend Background, Text and Hyperlink Colors - My website uses black text, black hyperlinks and white backgrounds and so I have made my ads use the same color scheme. I have met with some success in leaving the hyperlinks in blue and thats something you can experiment with on your site.

Blend the fonts (family and size) - In order to give a seamless experience, its important to blend the fonts of your site and Adsense to give that seamless experience. Adsense currently supports Times, Verdana and Arial. I find Verdana the best for my type of Blog website and I have gone ahead and used the same font family and font size for my ads as well as my blog.

Blend the reading layout - Most websites have left and right navigations/sections that read from top to bottom and the main content pane that reads left to right. I have tried to keep my ads to follow the same reading pattern. With most Google Ads getting the left to right is rather difficult because their ads formats run top to bottom. The new 728 x 90 format released in July 2010 somewhat achieves the left to right and I have seen good increase in click-through rates.

Blend close to main reading content - The closer/deeply integrated the ad with your content, I think you have a better shot of improving CTR.

Blending ads with your content is not against the policies of Google Adsense, unless you do something that Google prohibits. As usual, I recommend making the change and seeing the results 1-week before and after the change to determine the impact.

When Google came up with their text ads, they were very successful because users seemed to click through at a higher rates over image ads. It was my belief that text ads would get a higher click through rate thereby increasing my earnings. In many of my ad settings, I had gone with text only ads but had to reconsider the setting based on the following email I got from the Adsense team.

Our system analyzed your domain, dinesh.com, and found that you€™re not opted-in to image ads on at least 50% of the pages of your site. For example, we€™ve found that your 160x600 ad unit on dinesh.com/history_of_logos/worlds_best_brands_and_logos.html is only opted-in to text ads. We recommend that you opt-in to image ads for all of your AdSense ad units.

We've found that our publishers who show both image and text ads are able to earn higher revenues. Opting into text and image ads increases competition among the ads competing to appear on your site, as both text and rich media ads (image, flash and video) will compete in the ad auction. We will then automatically display the ads which will yield the highest earnings for you.

I did change the setting and what I found was that with the image/text setting, my click through rate dropped a bit but my ECPM went up thereby my earnings went up. I would strongly recommend experimenting with this setting.

Observe data for a week before and for a week after the change and make a decision. Each site is unique so you may get different results.

Our system analyzed your domain, dinesh.com, and found that you€™re not opted-in to image ads on at least 50% of the pages of your site. For example, we€™ve found that your 160x600 ad unit on dinesh.com/history_of_logos/worlds_best_brands_and_logos.html is only opted-in to text ads. We recommend that you opt-in to image ads for all of your AdSense ad units.

We've found that our publishers who show both image and text ads are able to earn higher revenues. Opting into text and image ads increases competition among the ads competing to appear on your site, as both text and rich media ads (image, flash and video) will compete in the ad auction. We will then automatically display the ads which will yield the highest earnings for you.

If you look at most of the sites, they usually have a left navigation, center content section and a right navigation area. My site is structured that way and I have experimented with ads on both the left navigation and also the right navigation to see if there was any difference in the click-through rates. Based on a few experiments, I have come to the conclusion that the ads in my left navigation performed a lot better than the ads on the right. I don't know the reasons why but there was a 2-3 time improvement in the click-through rate.

Maybe its because English language sites are organized left to right and users may tend to focus their eyes on the left part of the screen rather than the right.

Seems like a strange tip, Adsense is about SEO? A lot of people focus on tuning their ads to improve the click-through rate but if there is little to no traffic, there will be low earnings. The primary focus to improve your earnings should be to focus on tuning your site so that it shows up high on the search engine rankings. I have a section of the site dedicated to optimizing your site for improving your Google rankings.

I was able to improve my trafffic more than 10 fold using the tips in that sections and it improved by earnings by about 10 fold as well.

The Google Adsense Program is built for webmasters who present content. The Adsense bots and other code parse the content of your pages, determine what the main topic of the page is and present ads that match the topic. So the most important aspect of your page is the content. The key things on any given page should be the following

If possible, have an H1 tag on the page that identifies the topic being discussed.

The page must have a good number of instances of the keyword being discussed.

The page must have a good amount of content so that the Adsense bots can determine the theme of the page and eventually the theme of the site.

Ensure that the page title also has the keywords that represent the content of the page.